For the past few years I’ve been tracking St. Louis Public Schools issues as I conducted research for and wrote my forthcoming mystery novel, Fail. Today Vashon High Schools students organized a protest, demanding better teachers and learning environment, citing some of the same ills I’ve chronicled in my book: substitute teachers who did nothing, frequent fights among students, and low educational standards. State Senator Jamilah Nasheed joined the protest and told students, “If you’re not educated you will be incarcerated,” eerily echoing the epigraph of my book, “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail,” from Mark Twain.
You can read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story of the protest here.